FIRST it was BlackBerry going down, then just recently NatWest lost control of its computers and paralysed the financial lives of millions of people trying to pay mortgages or access their accounts.

A week ago the O2 network collapsed, leaving thousands cut off from normal communication. Ironically the firm told its customers to monitor its website for updates and then that crashed too.

Modern technology relies on instant obedience to whatever we tell it to do and when it breaks down it leaves us stranded in a way that old-fashioned but slower methods did not. It has led us to believe that we are kings of the universe when the reality is we are helpless slaves.

No postal strike could paralyse communication as effectively as something lost in the ether. A cheque lost in the post can be cancelled and its replacement sent by courier but a transfer that has emptied an account but not arrived at its destination is a very different matter. Once we were geared to letters arriving the next day and were content to wait but now people expect a reply to an email as soon as it is received.

Modern technology relies on instant obedience to whatever we tell it to do and when it breaks down it leaves us stranded in a way that old-fashioned but slower methods did not

They want information on tap from the internet which once they would have had to make time to look up in a library.

I prefer the current mechanisms but I am old enough to know how to react when they fail. What worries me is not that NatWest or O2 lose control of their systems but that an entire nation should be so dependent on them that life simply seizes up. After the passage of another two generations there will be nobody left who has known another way of transacting business or anything other than action being met with instant reaction.

We all joke that if you cannot get a computer to work you ask any available five-year-old to sort it out. But there will come a time when the systems fail massively and there will be no available 90-year-old upon whom to call who knows another way of carrying out business.